The wellbeing of individuals, whether patients or other otherwise, is often dependent upon the ability to access data regarding such individual pertaining to his/her activities and undertakings, and particularly with regard to their compliance in the administering of medication, monitoring of symptoms, and carrying out prescribed activities to maintain wellness. Adherence to medication protocols is a known issue in the medical field, it being estimated that less than 60% of patients correctly adhere to medication instructions and schedules. Consequently, a variety of devices and products have been developed and introduced commercially with the intent and desire of improving adherence to such protocols.
In the past, pillboxes having separate compartments for the days of the week or month are marketed to patients taking multiple medications daily. In addition, a number of “alarm” or “nagging” type devices are available, which provide an audible and/or visual alarm as a reminder to take medications. A small number of recent devices have compartments that are aware of being opened and report to a web service.
While the known systems provide some improvement over protocol adherence, these devices suffer from a number of shortcomings. Specifically, these known devices do not keep records of if and when medications have been taken, nor do they provide real time reminders. Additionally, known systems are not readily portable and, to the extent audible or visual alarms are used throughout the day, they are typically annoying and undesirable. They are limited in the number of pills and a small number of days that the device can support adherence.
The prior art is also devoid of systems that provide for a broad range of monitoring of the activities and/or physical indicia of an individual's wellbeing over a course of time. These systems do not provide for real time data access by the individual or patient, his physician or associated researcher, or the pharmacy providing the requested medications. The systems do not provide interaction between healthcare provider and researcher, facilitate education opportunities, serve as a hub for biometric information obtained from other devices (e.g. scales, oximeters, blood press cuffs, etc.) or provide easy modifications to existing regimens by the health care team.
In light of the foregoing, there remains a need in the art for a user friendly adaptive system capable of not only ensuring compliance to medication protocols, but also for monitoring the various indicia of the health and wellbeing of a patient or other individual over a course of time, such that data is available for either immediate or subsequent analysis and resultant modification of medication protocol if such is indicated. Further, the system can serve as an active monitor for physical parameters, activity, emotion, mood,